Throughout our The Business of Security series, we’ve explored vendor due diligence, security maturity, operational resilience, and shared responsibility. All of those topics eventually converge on the same moment: the day something goes wrong.
Because despite what marketing pages might imply, every organization has a bad day eventually.
A system fails. A vendor experiences an outage. Data becomes unavailable. A security incident occurs. The specifics vary, but the experience is remarkably consistent. Leaders suddenly discover that what appeared to be a technology problem is actually a business problem, an operational problem, and a communication problem all at the same time.
The organizations that emerge strongest from these situations rarely do so because they avoided every mistake. They succeed because they respond differently. While less prepared organizations focus exclusively on technical remediation, mature organizations understand that the first 24 hours are fundamentally about decision-making, communication, and trust. Technical recovery matters enormously, but it is only one part of the response.
The First 24 Hours Are About Decisions
When most people picture incident response, they imagine technical teams racing to identify root causes, isolate systems, and restore services. Those activities are certainly important, but they’re only part of what happens during a significant event.
At the leadership level, incident response is largely a series of decisions made under conditions of uncertainty.
Who needs to be notified? What systems are affected? What business functions are disrupted? What should customers be told? How frequently should updates be provided? What information has been confirmed versus what remains unknown? These questions often arise long before technical teams have a complete understanding of the situation. The pressure comes from the fact that business operations continue moving while the answers are still developing.
This is one reason mature organizations place so much emphasis on preparation. They understand that the middle of an incident is a poor time to begin defining responsibilities, communication channels, or escalation procedures. The strongest incident response plans do more than document technical recovery steps. They establish decision-making processes so leaders know who is responsible for evaluating business impact, coordinating communications, and making difficult choices when information is incomplete.
The organizations that struggle most during incidents are rarely struggling because talented people aren’t involved. More often, they’re struggling because nobody established a framework for how decisions should be made. The result is confusion, delays, duplicated effort, and uncertainty at the exact moment when clarity is needed most.
Communication Is Often the Difference Between Confidence and Chaos
Imagine two airlines experiencing the same weather delay on the same evening. One airline remains silent for two hours before suddenly announcing a new departure time. The other provides updates every twenty minutes, even when the update is simply, “We don’t have new information yet, and the next update will be provided at 7:40.”
A month later, most travelers can still tell you which airline they trusted more. Neither controlled the weather. Both controlled communication.
Customers going through an outage, disruption, or security incident evaluate organizations in much the same way. They already know systems fail. Most reasonable people do not expect perfection. What they want to understand is whether the organization is paying attention, whether it understands the problem, and whether it can be trusted to provide accurate information as events unfold.
This is why communication deserves a place alongside technical response efforts. Customers interpret silence as uncertainty. They often assume the absence of information means the organization does not understand what is happening or is choosing not to share it. Neither interpretation is particularly helpful. Regular updates, even when little has changed, provide reassurance that the issue remains actively managed and that communication channels remain open.
One of the most common mistakes organizations make is waiting until they have all the answers before communicating. Unfortunately, incidents rarely cooperate with that strategy. By the time complete information becomes available, customers have often spent hours filling the silence with their own assumptions.
Trust Is Built During the Worst Moments
Organizations spend enormous amounts of time trying to build trust with customers. Marketing campaigns, product investments, client meetings, and service improvements all contribute to that effort.
What often gets overlooked is that crises reveal trust more effectively than any of those activities.
I’ve come to think of customer trust as a running balance rather than a fixed score. Every service disruption, outage, or security incident creates a withdrawal from that account. That part is unavoidable. Something happened that negatively affected the customer experience. No messaging strategy can erase that reality. The organization’s response, however, becomes a separate transaction entirely. How leaders communicate, how transparently they share information, and how consistently they follow through all influence whether trust continues to grow or begins to deteriorate.
In some cases, organizations actually emerge from incidents with stronger customer relationships than they had beforehand. The incident itself certainly wasn’t positive, but the response demonstrated accountability, transparency, and professionalism in a way customers rarely get to observe during normal business operations. Strong responses give customers confidence that the organization can be trusted when circumstances become difficult.
Transparency Is More Valuable Than Perfection
One of the most important lessons leaders learn during an incident is that customers care less about perfection than many organizations assume.
What customers struggle with is uncertainty.
They want problems acknowledged quickly. They want updates delivered in plain language. They want to know what is being done and when they can expect additional information. Most importantly, they want straightforward communication that prioritizes clarity over image management.
Transparency does not mean sharing information that has not been verified. It does not mean speculating about causes or making promises that cannot be kept. It means explaining what is known, acknowledging what is not yet known, and committing to provide updates as new information becomes available.
The temptation during a crisis is often to overpromise. Leaders want to reassure customers. Teams want to demonstrate confidence. Unfortunately, a missed recovery estimate frequently causes more damage than the original disruption. Customers are generally understanding when an organization says it does not yet know how long resolution will take. They become much less understanding when an organization confidently provides timelines that repeatedly prove inaccurate.
Mature organizations recognize that credibility is one of the most important assets they possess during a crisis. Every communication either strengthens or weakens that credibility. The goal is not to sound optimistic. The goal is to sound trustworthy.
The Incident Isn’t the End of the Story
One of the most overlooked phases of incident response begins after services have been restored and normal operations have resumed.
This is the point where customers want answers.
What happened? What was learned? What changed? How will similar issues be prevented in the future?
Organizations that treat recovery as the finish line miss an important opportunity. Customers are not only evaluating whether the issue was resolved. They’re evaluating whether the organization learned from the experience and improved as a result. A thoughtful post-incident communication often provides more confidence than the technical recovery itself because it demonstrates maturity, accountability, and continuous improvement.
The organizations that consistently earn trust understand that incidents are not defined solely by the disruption. They are also defined by the response. Customers may remember the outage, the disruption, or the difficult day. What they tend to remember even more clearly is whether the organization communicated honestly, acted decisively, and remained transparent throughout the process.
The Real Measure of Readiness
Many organizations evaluate their incident response program by looking at technical capabilities, security controls, and recovery tools. Those elements matter, but they are only part of the equation.
The stronger measure of readiness is whether leadership can make decisions under pressure, whether communication plans function when customers need information most, and whether the organization can maintain trust while managing uncertainty. Those are ultimately business capabilities as much as technical ones.
Technology helps organizations recover. Communication helps customers stay informed. Transparency helps preserve trust. Together, those capabilities determine what customers remember long after systems have been restored.
Read the final article in our The Business of Security series: Getting to “Yes” With AI: Governance that Enables Innovation.
